"Amazing Grace" Murray Hopper

“From then on,
when anything went wrong with a computer, we said it had bugs in it.” Grace Hopper,
quoted in Time magazine April 16, 1984.

Grace Hopper
was born as Grace Brewster Murray on December 9, 1906, in New York. She was the oldest
daughter of Walter Fletcher Murray, a local insurance broker, and Mary Campbell
Van Horne Murray. Her parents strongly believed that Grace and her three years
younger sister should have the same education and opportunities as their five
years younger brother and from an early age her father encouraged her not to
follow the traditional role and paths of women. Grace took his advice to heart
and has followed it ever since. Her mother, a housewife, not only taught her
needlepoint and playing the piano but also instilled in her a love for and
understanding of mathematics. As a youngster she was fascinated by all things
mechanical and it is a well-known story how she at age seven took an alarm
clock apart in order to see how it worked. When she could not get the clock
back together again she took another clock apart to learn how it was assembled.
After taking seven clocks apart her mother found out and restricted her to just
one clock.

The early years

The young
Grace received her basic education at Graham School and Schoonmakers School –
both are private schools for girls in New York City. Having failed a Latin
exam she could not enter Vassar College as she had wanted, but was told to
wait one year. She spent one year at Hartridge School in Plainfield, New Jersey,
and in 1924 started at Vassar College studying mathematics and physics. In
1928 she graduated Phi Beta Kappa with a B.A. in mathematics and
physics. She then went to Yale University where she was awarded an M.A. in
mathematics and physics in 1930. That same year she married Vincent Foster
Hopper, an English teacher and honors graduate from Princeton University.
Although they separated in 1940 and got divorced in 1945, she always kept her
ex-husband’s name, possibly because shortly after their divorce Vincent Hopper
was killed in World War II. The Hoppers had no children. In 1931 she joined Vassar
College to begin teaching mathematics. She continued this until 1943 when she
joined the United States war effort. In 1934 she received her Ph.D. in
mathematics from Yale University on her thesis New Types of
Irreducibility Criteria.

World War II

When
Pearl Harbor was attacked in December 1941, Grace was keen to join the U.S.
Navy. But her age – she was 35 at the time – and her weight – she was only 105
pounds (47.6 kg) which was five pounds too light for her height of 5’6” – made
the Navy rule against her. Being a professor of mathematics it was thought she
would be of more value in civil life. Grace was not one to give up easily and
continued her efforts to join the Navy. She finally succeeded and having been
granted leave by Vassar College, she joined the Navy WAVES (Women Accepted for
Voluntary Emergency Service) in December 1943.
After her initial training, she was commissioned a Lieutenant (Junior Grade)
and assigned to the Bureau of Ordnance’s Computation Project at Harvard University
where she worked with Howard H. Aiken on the world’s first large-scale computer,
the Harvard Mark I.
She was enthralled by the 51 foot long, 8 foot
high machine filled with relays, switches, rotating wheels and vacuum tubes,
more than 750,000 different parts in total. The Mark I did calculations with a
speed of three additions per second. Hopper became the first female programmer
ever. Towards the end of the war she was working on the Mark II computer. It
was here where the famous “computer bug” was found (see below). Although Hopper
ended her active duty with the Navy in 1946, she remained a reservist. She
resigned from Vassar to remain at Harvard where she became Research Fellow in
Engineering Sciences and Applied Physics in the Computation Laboratory. She continued
her work on the Mark II and later the Mark III.

After the War

In 1946
Hopper joined the Eckert-Mauchley Computer Corporation – later to
become Sperry Rand – where she was involved with the development of the UNIVAC
(UNIversal Automatic Computer), the world’s first commercial electronic
computer. Although she stayed with Sperry Rand until 1967, Hopper continued to
switch her interests and activities between the Navy, the academic world and
civil society, often holding more than one position at the time.
In those early days of computing programmers had to
write their programs in binary code – strings of 0’s and 1’s – as that was the
only language understood by the computer. Hopper soon realized that it would
help greatly if the computer had a routine to convert instructions into machine
code. In 1952 she developed the world’s first compiler, the A-0, for that purpose.
This was followed by the A-1 and A-2 in 1953. Although Hopper’s compilers were initially
devised to place certain subroutines (e.g. for calculating sines, cosines or
doing floating-point arithmetic) in a place in the computer’s memory, it opened
up the way for compilers converting high-level language into machine language.
It was a significant step forward in the development of the computer.

COBOL

In 1956
Hopper devised the FLOW-MATIC compiler for the UNIVAC computer which translated
an English-like high-level language, with words like Write and Input, to machine language.
She once told the story that she had developed a French version of FLOW-MATIC
where all the English words were replaced by French words. When she showed it
to her bosses at UNIVAC, they were abhorred at the idea of a French-speaking
computer and threw her out of the office. In the late fifties the demand for
high-level programming languages became stronger. Especially the U.S.
Department of Defense insisted on a common business oriented programming
language. IBM had developed the COMTRAN (COMmercial TRANslator) compiler for
this purpose, and Honeywell had developed a similar language, FACT. Hopper who
brought in her FLOW-MATIC experience, realized that if one used full-length
English words like READ or MULTIPLY in a structured and well-defined language,
a compiler could be developed to translate these words in machine language. It
signified the birth of COBOL – COmmon Business Oriented Language. It became the
most-widely used high-level programming language of the 20th century
and whole generations of programmers (including this author) were raised on
it.

Back to the Navy

In 1966
Hopper retired from the Navy reservist force, but the next year already
she was recalled to serve again in active duty. Although it started as a
six-month assignment it turned out to be for many years. She served as the
Director of the Navy Programming Languages Group in the U.S. Navy’s Office of
Information Systems. As such she was involved with the standardization of
high-level languages like COBOL and FORTRAN and she instituted the testing for
conformance to these standards within the Navy. Later this would be taken over
by the National Bureau of Standards, which today goes by the name National
Institute of Standards and Technology. In 1971, at age 65, she retired again,
but the next year she was asked to re-enlist once more, the Navy seemed to
find her irreplaceable.

During
her years with the Navy she travelled countrywide and lectured on her favorite
subject “computers”, whereby she often included her own personal war-stories
from the early years of computing. She was well-known for showing a piece of
copper wire of about one foot long, which she called a nanosecond as that was
the distance electronic information (i.e. electricity) could travel in one
billionth of a second. She also showed a thousand feet coil of wire
representing a microsecond. It comes as no surprise that her audiences often
gave her a standing ovation after her presentations. She advocated change and
often stated her motto: "the most damaging phrase in the language
is “We've always done it this way”."

In 1983
Hopper was promoted by special Presidential Appointment to the rank of
Commodore. In 1985 this rank was renamed to Rear Admiral – she became the first
woman to ever hold this rank. Due to her wealth of experience and her seniority
in rank she got the nickname “Amazing Grace”. In 1986, when she was 80 years of
age, she retired for the final time from the Navy. She was presented with the Defense
Distinguished Service Medal, the Department of Defense’s highest award. Still
not interested in leading a quiet life, she was appointed as senior consultant
with DEC (Digital Equipment Corporation) to become their representative at
industry forums and to serve in a corporate liaison function. She held this
position until 1990.

In 1991
she was awarded the prestigious National Medal of Technology by President
George Bush for being “ a computer pioneer, who spent a half century
helping keep America on the leading edge of high technology.” She was the
first woman to receive this award.

“Amazing Grace”
Hopper died in her sleep on January 1, 1992 in Alexandria, Virginia. She was laid
to rest with full Naval honors in Arlington National Cemetery.

Hopper honored

Grace
Hopper has received numerous awards in her lifetime, of which only a few can be
listed here.
1962: Elected a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.
1969: Named the first computer science “Man of the Year” by the Data Processing
Management Association.
1973: Elected Distinguished Fellow of the British Computer Society
1980: Awarded the Navy Meritorious Service Medal.
1985: The Naval Computer and Telecommunications Station in Dan Diego started
building the Grace Murray Hopper Service Center (for its data processing department).
Today it also houses a small museum with artifacts, awards and other items
Hopper received during her career.
1985: The Brewster Academy in Wolfeboro, New Hampshire, where a young Grace spent her
summer holidays in the Murray’s family cottage, named its computer lab after
her: the Grace Murray Hopper Center for Computer Learning.1987: Awarded the Computer History Museum’s Fellow Award.
1990: Microsoft’s female employees established a women employee group called
"Hoppers"; they also established a scholarship in her honor.
Grace Hopper received nearly 50 honorary degrees from universities worldwide during
her lifetime.

The USS Hopper (DDG 70)

In 1997
the U.S. Navy commissioned the guided missile destroyer USS Hopper (DDG70). The ship was named after Rear Admiral Grace
Murray Hopper whose pioneering spirit had served the Navy over so many years and
who had led the Navy into the computer era. The USS Hopper carries an impressive array of armaments, including
Tomahawk missiles, six torpedo tubes and a few other surprises. It is
appropriately nicknamed “Amazing Grace” andhas Pearl Harbor as its homeport.

The origin of the computer bug

Although
Hopper is often credited with having found the first bug, she was always
careful to mention when she recalled the story that she was not present when
the bug was actually found.
When she was involved with testing the Mark II Aiken Relay Calculator at Harvard in
1947 – not 1945 as mentioned in many accounts of this story – the machine malfunctioned.
Upon investigation the operators found a moth stuck at Relay #70, panel F.
Using tweezers, the moth was removed and taped to the computer log with the
explanatory text “First actual case of
bug being found.” The story was put out that the computer had been debugged
and the term “debugging” had been added to the computer world’s vocabulary.
Hopper often said “From then on, when anything went wrong
with a computer, we said it had bugs in it." The original logbook
page, dated September 9 and with the moth still taped to it, is located in the
Naval History Center at the U.S. Naval Surface Warfare Center in Dahlgren,
Virginia.

In trying
to identify this famous moth, I contacted a local entomologist from the University
of Stellenbosch in South Africa. Most likely the creature was a Spodoptera litura
specimen. This nocturnal moth goes by the common name Tropical Armyworm
which seems most appropriate for this story.